At the beginning of this article, I stated that my purpose in this writing wasn't political. The real meat of this article is everything above this point, and if that's all you're interested in you can safely stop reading now. There are no more tips or how-to's beyond this point. That being said, I do have an opinion on the controversy surrounding this release. Again, this is my opinion
as a simple user of Red Hat and other Linux distributions. Am I wrong? Maybe so, but consider this: instead of flaming me, try to see where I'm coming from. Figure out why I feel this way, work back to the source of my assumptions, and focus your efforts at that point. If my views are both flawed and shared by many others,
it stands to reason the information on which those views are based is
flawed and that only by providing a logical alternate
foundation for such beliefs can those views be altered, presumably
for the better. I'm not a Red Hat supporter or a KDE supporter in the
sense that being one precludes the other: I refuse to accept that, in
the wake of Psyche, it's an either-or proposition. Read on and you'll
see why.

Free
software, its supporters are often eager to point out, is about
choice. This might be the choice to use KDE or GNOME, KWord or
AbiWord, vi or emacs; but that is only the tip of the iceberg. The
choice isn't merely to use one tool in favor of another, but
to choose to modify that tool to whatever degree you deem
necessary to meet your needs. Red Hat has exercised this freedom with
Psyche in accordance with the licensing schemes of the affected
projects. If this seems particularly onerous to you, respond by
exercising your power of choice: do not bolster Red Hat's
activities by supporting their product, and present your reasoning
for this decision to others in a reasonable, logical manner. Flaming
others in support of a certain viewpoint often does more damage than
good to the cause, after all. What kind of message do we as a
community send when we shout about freedom of choice from one side of
our collective mouth while condemning Red Hat (or anyone else) out
the other side for exercising that very freedom in a manner we find
personally objectionable?

Mandrake,
SuSE and many other distributions ship more or less unmodified KDE
packages. ELX, Lycoris, Lindows, and Xandros (and probably others)
ship versions of KDE with modifications ranging from slight to
sweeping depending on the distribution. Often, these "enhancements"
are marketed near the top of the list of "unique, must-have"
features. How many awful things have you heard about Lindows? How
many of those awful things centered specifically on the heavily
modified KDE that is the heart of Lindows' desktop? How many times
have you heard Xandros criticized for continually letting shipping
dates slip? How many times have you heard it criticized for shipping
a modified KDE?

Red
Hat, of all the distribution producers, is seen by and large as "more
corporate" than the others (with the notable exception of the
much maligned Lindows). As such, Red Hat is often seen as somehow
more threatening than the others, leading to the obligatory shouting
by certain members of the community of: "Red Hat wants to be the
Microsoft of Linux! Resist! Resist before it's too late!"
This is not the closed source world, where Microsoft (or any other
entity, such as Apple in the Macintosh world or Sun in the high-end
server arena) reigns from on high and does whatever it wants, safe in
the knowledge that users will fall in line simply because they have
no other choice. Apple's legendary stability and ease of use stems
from its tight control of its products, for which it is generally
lauded by its users. Microsoft, by virtue of being orders of
magnitude larger (and subsequently more threatening) than Apple, is
widely condemned for attempting to exercise such control over every
aspect of the end user experience (such as driver signing, and
software and hardware certification). Arguably, this is why in a very
real sense the Macintosh user experience may be superior to the
Windows user experience: Microsoft is placed in the unenviable
position of having to support a nearly limitless array of PC
configurations, often using low-quality hardware, while Apple is not.
There's a lesson in that, to be sure, but in the end it just doesn't
matter when the topic at hand is Linux: the rules that govern the
closed source computing world simply do not apply to open source
projects such as Linux. There can be no monopoly in such a
system. The open source software model was carefully crafted from the
ground up specifically to prevent such an eventuality.

Red
Hat literally cannot become the "Microsoft of Linux".
Microsoft's source code is jealously guarded and fiercely protected,
Red Hat's is available to anyone who wants it, not just for viewing
but for modification and reuse by anyone. Red Hat, should it
misbehave badly enough to anger a large enough faction, could be
undone with its own code. It bears repeating: the open source
world is not structured to tolerate a monopoly. Red Hat is a service
company, and as such its primary interest is in supporting its
Linux distribution. Any changes Red Hat makes to its distribution
must be viewed in this light. Suggesting that Red Hat is
intentionally including software in the form of a modified KDE
just to harm an open source project is suggesting that the
(allegedly) fearfully ambitious corporation that is Red Hat is run by
a gaggle of fools eager to commit financial suicide. Red Hat's
primary interest is in supporting its distribution, remember.
One finds it hard to believe the company would ship an intentionally
broken or inferior product which would only serve the dual purpose of
increasing the burden of providing support and of alienating the
company's paying customers -- not you and I, but Red Hat's real
customers, corporates with volume buying power and millions to spend
on software support contracts. Whatever the end result and
eventual outcome of these changes, you can rest assured that Red Hat
did not intentionally set out to ship bad software. Working
within the confines of the GPL, Red Hat set out to minimize support
needs and associated costs and to maximize user experience as they
see it for their target user base.

Open
source projects which chafe at Red Hat's (or any other entity's)
handling of their code within the legal -- if not moral or
ethical, unquantifiable as such things are -- confines of the
project's licensing might wish to take a closer look at their choice
of licensing. Is it acceptable to claim a project is "free"
in all senses of the word -- but only so long as:

1)
The exercise of those freedoms are "acceptable" (whatever
the consensus on that might be at any given time among the
project's many developers) and

2)
so long as the entity making the changes is "friendly" with
the free software project in question (again, how does one quantify
this?)

Let
me point out here that I am not aiming criticism at the KDE
project or its developers, but at the large number of various people
who have condemned Red Hat (often based on wildly incorrect data and
vague rumors) for modifying KDE. The vast majority of these people
aren't affiliated with KDE at all, except maybe as simple users. To
these people, I say this: A project is either free or it is not. The
GPL does not provide for the arbitrary picking and choosing of
entities "worthy" to participate in those freedoms. That is
just one among many of the checks and balances the elegant simplicity
of the GPL provides to prevent development stagnation (anyone can
fork a project and try to do a better job than those handling the
original) and to stop cold the ability of any one entity to summarily
take over a project (for the very same reason). The GPL, love it or
hate it, is the cornerstone of Linux development. So long as the GPL
remains effective neither Red Hat nor any other distributor will be
capable of -- or sanely interested in -- "taking over"
Linux in whole or in part. It seems that former Windows users,
accustomed to Microsoft's (and others') business tactics, are wary
perhaps to the point of paranoia about such things and immediately
suspect the worst whenever what appears to be purely corporate
interests are involved with their computing experience. The idea of a
takeover and the subsequent destruction of choice that would follow
is a legitimate fear in the closed source world, but attempting to
supply a rationale for it in the open source world depends on a
logical fallacy. Any entity attempting such a thing would be met with
failure and rejection. Odd that the most successful of all Linux
distributors should be accused of charting just such a course for
disaster on a such a regular basis, don't you think?